Automated segmentation of upper digestive tract from abdominal contrast-enhanced CT data using hierarchical statistical modeling of organ interrelations

摘要

We have been studying the automatic segmentation of multi-organ region from abdominal CT images. In previous work, we proposed an approach using a hierarchical statistical modeling using a relationship between organs. In this paper, we have proposed automatic segmentation of the upper digestive tract from abdominal contrast-enhanced CT using previously segmented multiple organs. We compared segmentation accuracy of the esophagus, stomach and duodenum between our proposed method using hierarchical statistical modeling and a conventional statistical atlas method. Additionally, preliminary experiment was performed which added the region representing gas to the candidate region at the segmentation step. The segmentation results were evaluated quantitatively by Dice coefficient, Jaccard index and the average symmetric surface distance of the segmented region and correct region data. Percentage of the average of Dice coefficient of esophagus, stomach and duodenum were 58.7, 68.3, and 38.6 with prediction-based method and 23.7, 51.1, and 24.4 with conventional atlas method.